Restore a car or buy a new one?

I've been dealing with this for a few days now and sadly I can't get some solid advice from my friends (who knows nothing about cars by the way so I guess it's my fault) Well anyways, my dad left me with his old Toyota Corolla, I believe it's an E20, but I'm not sure really but he said it's from the 1970's so it can either be an E20 or E10. The car still runs but by the looks of it, and due to my dad's poor maintenance of the car, it seems to belong more to a junk yard rather than a garage. We've checked on the car several times before, it can cost us a lot of work but it can be restored, now my dilemma is, should we stick to the restoration of the car (my dad really likes it) or should we just spend the money and buy a new one? And if you've done some car restoration before how much did it cost you on average? Thanks in advance.

 

Restoring a car is no joke. If you restoring a call for sentimental value and because it's been in your family for a long time then I guess it's worth the time that effort and the money. But if you're looking at restoring the car just to save some money then this is not for you. Restoring the car is very costly and sometimes you might end up basically buying an entire new car. Because the car is old the parts may be reading hard to find. Maintaining the car might also be a serious challenge because of the age is one. In your case I recommend that you buy a new car.

 

To restore a car from the seventies may prove more of a challenge than you can imagine. Parts may be hard to come by plus as soon as you repair one area another may go bad causing you to always be repairing. The only reason I would restore such a car would be for sentimental reasons. It would be nice to hold on to something in the family for a long time but you have to consider whether it is really worth doing so.

 

As others have said restoring a car is costly, my brother restored a 1992 Mustang LX and it cost him $18k. It was $8k for the pain job alone and $10k in parts. The previous owner had already rebuilt the engine or it would have cost even more money. But its money well spent, because the car was appraised $28k and he has won countless trophies with it, including one from Ford World Headquarters Mustang show.

Greg